


Outcast

by Person_with_a_cool_name



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek - Various Authors, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Alternate Title: The life of an outcast, Character Study, Feelings, Hurt, Hurt No Comfort, Loneliness, Pain, h/nc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-03
Updated: 2019-02-03
Packaged: 2019-10-21 16:38:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17646413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Person_with_a_cool_name/pseuds/Person_with_a_cool_name
Summary: Outcast: “one who is cast out or rejected by society” (Merriam Webster)The most painful thing about his exile isn’t even that this is permanent. It isn’t that all those sacrifices  he made are just discarded, all the months on cold rainy planets, all the perils of his past life.





	Outcast

Garak is not prone to homesickness. Not at all. He is, after all, and Obsidian Order agent, and he has been away on deep cover missions for months at a time.  
The most painful thing about his exile isn’t even that this is permanent. It isn’t that all those sacrifices he made are just discarded, all the months on cold rainy planets, all the perils of his past life.  
He does not get homesick, it does not pain him, and he can forget the permanence - most of the time.

It aches fiercely, though, when one of those tiny moments sneaks up on him.  
When he gets a craving for that one special food while sewing and he’s just about to order it when he realises that the replicators don’t have it. That no one here has it. That no one can cook it, because no one has ever heard the name and he’s never going to eat it again.  
He feels like his heart might stop from the pain when he wakes up to cold air and orders the computer to turn the heating up in Cardasi before his brain turns on and he realises that they won’t listen. That he has to speak a second language to get a heating level that is still bone-chilling cold. 

Obviously, it’s the worse when there’s a slow day. Slow days allow him to think. It’s when he sits around at his desk for hours with nothing to do, when the bottles at Quark’s and their frankly disgusting swill are ever more enticing, his fingers frozen solid and a headache that surely even his implant wouldn’t have dampened from those lights. Cardassians are nocturnal. Sometimes, he misses just being up at night in the city, at break time, all the people milling around, the food carts, even the fucking dirt because while this station is ugly, it’s also nearly sterile and it drives him mad. It smells of disinfectant. And cheap food, if you have the misfortune of getting too close to the restaurants. Sometimes of ozone and sweat, and Guls and Gettle, he hates how mammals stink.

But the worst are the holidays. He tries not to, because he does not get homesick, and because he lives on a bajoran space station now, because it’s cold bright ugly deep space nine with the stinky mammals and not refined cardasi’or, but he always knows what time it is at his old flat. Is it still there? Did they sell it? Destroy it, just out of principle? It wasn’t big, but it was beautiful and comfortable when he had the chance to be there. And right now, it’s Union Day and the gardens will be blooming and in just an hour or two, dawn will fall and the kids will eat trever cake and start bright kril’i all over the sky, and he can’t do this anymore. He can’t pretend he is find here in this hell hole of a station when all his thoughts are consumed by Cardassia.

So, Elim Garak does not get homesick. But he loves Cardassia, and it is going to kill him.


End file.
